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From their original design as simple broadcast receivers, today’s televisions have evolved into powerful, internet-connected entertainment hubs. Combining traditional viewing with online capabilities, smart TVs provide instant access to streaming platforms, web browsing, voice assistants, and personalized recommendations.
As our TVs have grown smarter, however, they’ve also become gateways to new privacy and security challenges. In a chilling echo of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, it’s possible that Big Brother, or in this case, Big Hacker, might be surveilling you through your own television.
In 2013, evidence emerged that smart TVs can be just as vulnerable to hacking as home computers, following an investigation by security analysts Aaron Grattafiori and Josh Yavor at iSEC Partners. Working with smart TV manufacturers to address potential vulnerabilities, the analysts presented their findings at the Black Hat network security conference in Las Vegas. Their demonstration highlighted the concerning possibility of smart TVs not only physically surveilling you through the built-in camera but also prying deeper into your personal life by collecting data on your web searches, app usage, and preferences.
Smart TVs can be hacked in several ways, but the gateway that opens your smart TV to these attacks is the IP address, which links with internet-driven apps such as Facebook and YouTube, as well as video streaming services, microphones, and even internal cameras. Because smart TVs often run the same code as computers and smartphones, such as JavaScript or HTML5, they are also susceptible to malware and spyware attacks. These are some of the ways your device can be hacked:
Once a hacker has compromised your smart TV, they can spy on you through several built-in technologies that collect data on your viewing habits, conversations, and online activities.
The key to managing these privacy risks is understanding what data your TV collects and taking control through privacy settings, network restrictions, and informed usage decisions.
Your smart TV data typically flows to multiple parties. It starts with the device manufacturer for product improvements, then to streaming app providers for content recommendations, on to advertising networks for targeted marketing, and analytics companies for usage insights. Recent regulatory guidance emphasizes that you should have clear visibility into these data-sharing relationships through your TV’s privacy policy.
You can limit data collection by disabling Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) in your TV’s privacy settings, turning off personalized advertising, and regularly reviewing app permissions. Consumer protection agencies require smart TV manufacturers to provide opt-out mechanisms for advertising personalization and data sharing with third parties.
Fortunately, you can significantly reduce your smart TV risks with some simple preventive measures:
Most smart TVs don’t fully turn off when you press the power button; they enter standby mode to enable quick startup. In this state, certain components may remain active and continue collecting data. It might maintain network connectivity to receive software updates, keep microphones and voice assistants ready to respond to wake words, or continue ACR that tracks your viewing habits.
To truly disconnect your TV from potential monitoring, you have several options:
It depends on your specific smart TV model and its manufacturing date. Most modern smart TVs manufactured after 2022 do not include built-in cameras. Major manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, Sony, and TCL have largely moved away from integrating cameras directly into their television sets due to privacy concerns and limited consumer adoption.
Some premium models and older smart TVs from 2018-2021 may still feature built-in cameras designed typically used for:
If your smart TV does have a camera, you still have control, as most smart TVs with cameras include physical privacy shutters, software controls to disable the camera, or the option to cover the lens. For external USB cameras, simply unplugging it ensures that no one can see you through the smart TV.
To determine if your smart TV has a camera, check the following:
If you discover your smart TV has a camera, you can take control of your privacy by disabling it in your TV’s settings, covering it with tape when not in use, or using any built-in privacy shutters.
Aside from the precautions listed above, there are other ways you can disable your smart TV’s camera:
If the thought of your living room turning into a hacker’s surveillance paradise sends a chill down your spine, you’re not alone. Fortunately, you can take some protective measures that keep your smart TV safe.
One of the best ways to protect yourself is to stay informed about the latest developments in smart TV security. Attend webinars, read articles, and follow experts in the field to stay current with the latest security threats and fixes.
Just as importantly, small but effective digital habits will also fortify your smart TV security: keep your TV’s firmware updated, stick to official app stores, secure your home Wi-Fi with strong encryption, use unique passwords for your devices, limit the use of social media and messaging apps on your TV, and be cautious about what you plug into your TV’s ports.
By following these recommendations, you can continue to relax in your living room and enjoy your digital entertainment experience without compromising your privacy and security.
The post How To Tell If Your Smart TV Spying on You appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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Two-step verification, two-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication…whatever your social media platform calls it, it’s an excellent way to protect your accounts.
There’s a good chance you’re already using multi-factor verification with your other accounts — for your bank, your finances, your credit card, and any number of things. The way it requires an extra one-time code in addition to your login and password makes life far tougher for hackers.
It’s increasingly common to see nowadays, where all manner of online services only allow access to your accounts after you’ve provided a one-time passcode sent to your email or smartphone. That’s where two-step verification comes in. You get sent a code as part of your usual login process (usually a six-digit number), and then you enter that along with your username and password.
Some online services also offer the option to use an authenticator app, which sends the code to a secure app rather than via email or your smartphone. Authenticator apps work much in the same way, yet they offer three unique features:
Google, Microsoft, and others offer authenticator apps if you want to go that route. You can get a good list of options by checking out the “editor’s picks” at your app store or in trusted tech publications.
Whichever form of authentication you use, always keep that secure code to yourself. It’s yours and yours alone. Anyone who asks for that code, say someone masquerading as a customer service rep, is trying to scam you. With that code, and your username/password combo, they can get into your account.
Passwords and two-step verification work hand-in-hand to keep you safer. Yet not any old password will do. You’ll want a strong, unique password. Here’s how that breaks down:
Now, with strong passwords in place, you can get to setting up multi-factor verification on your social media accounts.
When you set up two-factor authentication on Facebook, you’ll be asked to choose one of three security methods:
And here’s a link to the company’s full walkthrough: https://www.facebook.com/help/148233965247823
When you set up two-factor authentication on Instagram, you’ll be asked to choose one of three security methods: an authentication app, text message, or WhatsApp.
And here’s a link to the company’s full walkthrough: https://help.instagram.com/566810106808145
And here’s a link to the company’s full walkthrough: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1920866721452534
And here’s a link to the company’s full walkthrough: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185839?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop
1. TapProfileat the bottom of the screen.
2. Tap the Menu button at the top.
3. Tap Settings and Privacy, then Security.
4. Tap 2-step verification and choose at least two verification methods: SMS (text), email, and authenticator app.
5. Tap Turn on to confirm.
And here’s a link to the company’s full walkthrough: https://support.tiktok.com/en/account-and-privacy/personalized-ads-and-data/how-your-phone-number-is-used-on-tiktok
The post How to Protect Your Social Media Passwords with Multi-factor Verification appeared first on McAfee Blog.
There has been an exponential increase in breaches within enterprises despite the carefully constructed and controlled perimeters that exist around applications and data. Once an attacker can access… Read more on Cisco Blogs
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Join the guided tour outside the Security Operations Center, where we’ll discuss real time network traffic of the RSA Conference, as seen in the NetWitness platform. Engineers will be using Cisco S… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Trend Micro Research has developed a go-to resource for all things related to cybercriminal underground hosting and infrastructure. Today we released the second in this three-part series of reports which detail the what, how, and why of cybercriminal hosting (see the first part here).
As part of this report, we dive into the common life cycle of a compromised server from initial compromise to the different stages of monetization preferred by criminals. It’s also important to note that regardless of whether a company’s server is on-premise or cloud-based, criminals don’t care what kind of server they compromise.
To a criminal, any server that is exposed or vulnerable is fair game.
Cloud vs. On-Premise Servers
Cybercriminals don’t care where servers are located. They can leverage the storage space, computation resources, or steal data no matter what type of server they access. Whatever is most exposed will most likely be abused.
As digital transformation continues and potentially picks up to allow for continued remote working, cloud servers are more likely to be exposed. Many enterprise IT teams, unfortunately, are not arranged to provide the same protection for cloud as on-premise servers.
As a side note, we want to emphasize that this scenario applies only to cloud instances replicating the storage or processing power of an on-premise server. Containers or serverless functions won’t fall victim to this same type of compromise. Additionally, if the attacker compromises the cloud account, as opposed to a single running instance, then there is an entirely different attack life cycle as they can spin up computing resources at will. Although this is possible, however, it is not our focus here.
Attack Red Flags
Many IT and security teams might not look for earlier stages of abuse. Before getting hit by ransomware, however, there are other red flags that could alert teams to the breach.
If a server is compromised and used for cryptocurrency mining (also known as cryptomining), this can be one of the biggest red flags for a security team. The discovery of cryptomining malware running on any server should result in the company taking immediate action and initiating an incident response to lock down that server.
This indicator of compromise (IOC) is significant because while cryptomining malware is often seen as less serious compared to other malware types, it is also used as a monetization tactic that can run in the background while server access is being sold for further malicious activity. For example, access could be sold for use as a server for underground hosting. Meanwhile, the data could be exfiltrated and sold as personally identifiable information (PII) or for industrial espionage, or it could be sold for a targeted ransomware attack. It’s possible to think of the presence of cryptomining malware as the proverbial canary in a coal mine: This is the case, at least, for several access-as-a-service (AaaS) criminals who use this as part of their business model.
Attack Life Cycle
Attacks on compromised servers follow a common path:
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The monetization lifecycle of a compromised server
Often, targeted ransomware is the final stage. In most cases, asset categorization reveals data that is valuable to the business but not necessarily valuable for espionage.
A deep understanding of the servers and network allows criminals behind a targeted ransomware attack to hit the company where it hurts the most. These criminals would know the dataset, where they live, whether there are backups of the data, and more. With such a detailed blueprint of the organization in their hands, cybercriminals can lock down critical systems and demand higher ransom, as we saw in our 2020 midyear security roundup report.
In addition, while a ransomware attack would be the visible urgent issue for the defender to solve in such an incident, the same attack could also indicate that something far more serious has likely already taken place: the theft of company data, which should be factored into the company’s response planning. More importantly, it should be noted that once a company finds an IOC for cryptocurrency, stopping the attacker right then and there could save them considerable time and money in the future.
Ultimately, no matter where a company’s data is stored, hybrid cloud security is critical to preventing this life cycle.
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Identifying security threats early can be difficult, especially when you’re running multiple security tools across disparate business units and cloud projects. When it comes to protecting cloud-native applications, separating legitimate risks from noise and distractions is often a real challenge.
That’s why forward-thinking organizations look at things a little differently. They want to help their application developers and security operations (SecOps) teams implement unified strategies for optimal protection. This is where a newly expanded partnership from Trend Micro and Snyk can help.
Dependencies create risk
In today’s cloud-native development streams, the insatiable need for faster iterations and time-to-market can impact both downstream and upstream workflows. As a result, code reuse and dependence on third-party libraries has grown, and with it the potential security, compliance and reputational risk organizations are exposing themselves to.
Just how much risk is associated with open source software today? According to Snyk research, vulnerabilities in open source software have increased 2.5x in the past three years. https://info.snyk.io/sooss-report-2020. What’s more, a recent report claimed to have detected a 430% year-on-year increase in attacks targeting open source components, with the end goal of infecting the software supply chain. While open source code is therefore being used to accelerate time-to-market, security teams are often unaware of the scope and impact this can have on their environments.
Managing open source risk
This is why cloud security leader Trend Micro, and Snyk, a specialist in developer-first open source security, have extended their partnership with a new joint solution. It’s designed to help security teams manage the risk of open source vulnerabilities from the moment code is introduced, without interrupting the software delivery process.
This ambitious achievement helps improve security for your operations teams without changing the way your developer teams work. Trend Micro and Snyk are addressing open source risks by simplifying a bottom-up approach to risk mitigation that brings together developer and SecOps teams under one unified solution. It combines state-of-the-art security technology with collaborative features and processes to eliminate the security blind spots that can impact development lifecycles and business outcomes.
Available as part of Trend Micro Cloud One, the new solution being currently co-developed with Snyk will:
This unified solution closes the gap between security teams and developers, providing immediate visibility across modern cloud architectures. Trend Micro and Snyk continue to deliver world class protection that fits the cloud-native development and security requirements of today’s application-focused organizations.
The post Removing Open Source Visibility Challenges for Security Operations Teams appeared first on .
Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, read about one of Microsoft’s largest Patch Tuesday updates ever, including fixes for 120 vulnerabilities and two zero-days. Also, learn about Trend Micro’s new integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Read on:
Microsoft Patches 120 Vulnerabilities, Two Zero-Days
This week Microsoft released fixes for 120 vulnerabilities, including two zero-days, in 13 products and services as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday rollout. The August release marks its third-largest Patch Tuesday update, bringing the total number of security fixes for 2020 to 862. “If they maintain this pace, it’s quite possible for them to ship more than 1,300 patches this year,” says Dustin Childs of Trend Micro’s Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI).
Trend Micro has discovered an unusual infection related to Xcode developer projects. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that a developer’s Xcode project at large contained the source malware, which leads to a rabbit hole of malicious payloads. Most notable in our investigation is the discovery of two zero-day exploits: one is used to steal cookies via a flaw in the behavior of Data Vaults, another is used to abuse the development version of Safari.
Top Tips for Home Cybersecurity and Privacy in a Coronavirus-Impacted World: Part 1
We’re all now living in a post-COVID-19 world characterized by uncertainty, mass home working and remote learning. To help you adapt to these new conditions while protecting what matters most, Trend Micro has developed a two-part blog series on ‘the new normal’. Part one identifies the scope and specific cyber-threats of the new normal.
Trend Micro enhances agility and automation in cloud security through integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Through this collaboration, Trend Micro Cloud One offers the broadest platform support and API integration to protect AWS infrastructure whether building with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, containers, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) networking.
Shedding Light on Security Considerations in Serverless Cloud Architectures
The big shift to serverless computing is imminent. According to a 2019 survey, 21% of enterprises have already adopted serverless technology, while 39% are considering it. Trend Micro’s new research on serverless computing aims to shed light on the security considerations in serverless environments and help adopters in keeping their serverless deployments as secure as possible.
In One Click: Amazon Alexa Could be Exploited for Theft of Voice History, PII, Skill Tampering
Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant could be exploited to hand over user data due to security vulnerabilities in the service’s subdomains. The smart assistant, which is found in devices such as the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot — with over 200 million shipments worldwide — was vulnerable to attackers seeking user personally identifiable information (PII) and voice recordings.
New Attack Lets Hackers Decrypt VoLTE Encryption to Spy on Phone Calls
A team of academic researchers presented a new attack called ‘ReVoLTE,’ that could let remote attackers break the encryption used by VoLTE voice calls and spy on targeted phone calls. The attack doesn’t exploit any flaw in the Voice over LTE (VoLTE) protocol; instead, it leverages weak implementation of the LTE mobile network by most telecommunication providers in practice, allowing an attacker to eavesdrop on the encrypted phone calls made by targeted victims.
An Advanced Group Specializing in Corporate Espionage is on a Hacking Spree
A Russian-speaking hacking group specializing in corporate espionage has carried out 26 campaigns since 2018 in attempts to steal vast amounts of data from the private sector, according to new findings. The hacking group, dubbed RedCurl, stole confidential corporate documents including contracts, financial documents, employee records and legal records, according to research published this week by the security firm Group-IB.
Walgreens Discloses Data Breach Impacting Personal Health Information of More Than 72,000 Customers
The second-largest pharmacy chain in the U.S. recently disclosed a data breach that may have compromised the personal health information (PHI) of more than 72,000 individuals across the United States. According to Walgreens spokesman Jim Cohn, prescription information of customers was stolen during May protests, when around 180 of the company’s 9,277 locations were looted.
Top Tips for Home Cybersecurity and Privacy in a Coronavirus-Impacted World: Part 2
The past few months have seen radical changes to our work and home life under the Coronavirus threat, upending norms and confining millions of American families within just four walls. In this context, it’s not surprising that more of us are spending an increasing portion of our lives online. In the final blog of this two-part series, Trend Micro discusses what you can do to protect your family, your data, and access to your corporate accounts.
What are your thoughts on Trend Micro’s tips to make your home cybersecurity and privacy stronger in the COVID-19-impacted world? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.
The post This Week in Security News: Microsoft Patches 120 Vulnerabilities, Including Two Zero-Days and Trend Micro Brings DevOps Agility and Automation to Security Operations Through Integration with AWS Solutions appeared first on .
TL;DR Deal with your dirty laundry.
Have you ever skipped doing your laundry and watched as that pile of dirty clothes kept growing, just waiting for you to get around to it? You’re busy, you’re tired and you keep saying you’ll get to it tomorrow. Then suddenly, you realize that it’s been three weeks and now you’re running around frantically, late for work because you have no clean socks!
That is technical debt.
Those little things that you put off, which can grow from a minor inconvenience into a full-blown emergency when they’re ignored long enough.
How many times have you had an alarm go off, or a customer issue arise from something you already knew about and meant to fix, but “haven’t had the time”? How many times have you been working on something and thought, “wow, this would be so much easier if I just had the time to …”?
That is technical debt.
But back to you. In your craze to leave for work you manage to find two old mismatched socks. One of them has a hole in it. You don’t have time for this! You throw them on and run out the door, on your way to solve real problems. Throughout the day, that hole grows and your foot starts to hurt.
This is really not your day. In your panicked state this morning you actually managed to add more pain to your already stressed system, plus you still have to do your laundry when you get home! If only you’d taken the time a few days ago…
In the tech world where one seemingly small hole – one tiny vulnerability – can bring down your whole system, managing technical debt is critical. Fixing issues before they become emergent situations is necessary in order to succeed.
If you’re always running at full speed to solve the latest issue in production, you’ll never get ahead of your competition and only fall further behind.
It’s very easy to get into a pattern of leaving the little things for another day. Build optimizations, that random unit test that’s missing, that playbook you meant to write up after the last incident – technical debt is a real problem too! By spending just a little time each day to tidy up a few things, you can make your system more stable and provide a better experience for both your customers and your fellow developers.
Picture your code as that mountain of dirty laundry. Each day that passes, you add just a little more to it. The more debt you add on, the more daunting your task seems. It becomes a thing of legend. You joke about how you haven’t dealt with it, but really you’re growing increasingly anxious and wary about actually tackling it, and what you’ll find when you do.
Maybe if you put it off just a little bit longer a hero will swoop in and clean up for you! (A woman can dream, right?) The more debt you add, the longer it will take to conquer it, and the harder it will be and the higher the risk is of introducing a new issue.
This added stress and complexity doesn’t sound too appealing, so why do we do it? It’s usually caused by things like having too much work in progress, conflicting priorities and (surprise!) neglected work.
Managing technical debt requires only one important thing – a cultural change.
As much as possible we need to stop creating technical debt, otherwise we will never be able to get it under control. To do that, we need to shift our mindset. We need to step back and take the time to see and make visible all of the technical debt we’re drowning in. Then we can start to chip away at it.
My team took a page out of “The Unicorn Project” (Kim, 2019) and started by running “debt days” when we caught our breath between projects. Each person chose a pain point, something they were interested in fixing, and we started there. We dedicated two days to removing debt and came out the other side having completed tickets that were on the backlog for over a year.
We also added new metrics and dashboards for better incident response, and improved developer tools.
Now, with each new code change, we’re on the lookout. Does this change introduce any debt? Do we have the ability to fix that now? We encourage each other to fix issues as we find them whether it’s with the way our builds work, our communication processes or a bug in the code.
We need to give ourselves the time to breathe, in both our personal lives or our work day. Taking a pause between tasks not only allows us to mentally prepare for the next one, but it gives us time to learn and reflect. It’s in these pauses that we can see if we’ve created technical debt in any form and potentially go about fixing it right away.
The improvement of daily work ultimately enables developers to focus on what’s really important, delivering value. It enables them to move faster and find more joy in their work.
So how do you stay on top of your never-ending laundry? Your family chooses to makes a cultural change and decides to dedicate time to it. You declare Saturday as laundry day!
Make the time to deal with technical debt –your developers, security teams, and your customers will thank you for it.
The post Have You Considered Your Organization’s Technical Debt? appeared first on .
The cloud space has been evolving for almost a decade. As a company we’re a major cloud user ourselves. That means we’ve built up a huge amount of in-house expertise over the years around cloud migration — including common challenges and perspectives on how organizations can best approach projects to improve success rates.
As part of our #LetsTalkCloud series, we’ve focused on sharing some of this expertise through conversations with our own experts and folks from the industry. To kick off the series, we discussed some of the security challenges solution architects and security engineers face with customers when discussing cloud migrations. Spoiler…these challenges may not be what you expect.
Drag and drop
This lack of strategy and planning from the start is symptomatic of a broader challenge in many organizations: There’s no big-picture thinking around cloud, only short-term tactical efforts. Sometimes we get the impression that a senior exec has just seen a ‘cool’ demo at a cloud vendor’s conference and now wants to migrate a host of apps onto that platform. There’s no consideration of how difficult or otherwise this would be, or even whether it’s necessary and desirable.
These issues are compounded by organizational siloes. The larger the customer, the larger and more established their individual teams are likely to be, which can make communication a major challenge. Even if you have a dedicated cloud team to work on a project, they may not be talking to other key stakeholders in DevOps or security, for example.
The result is that, in many cases, tools, applications, policies, and more are forklifted over from on-premises environments to the cloud. This ends up becoming incredibly expensive. as these organizations are not really changing anything. All they are doing is adding an extra middleman, without taking advantage of the benefits of cloud-native tools like microservices, containers, and serverless.
There’s often no visibility or control. Organizations don’t understand they need to lockdown all their containers and sanitize APIs, for example. Plus, there’s no authority given to cloud teams around governance, cost management, and policy assignment, so things just run out of control. Often, shared responsibility isn’t well understood, especially in the new world of DevOps pipelines, so security isn’t applied to the right areas.
Getting it right
These aren’t easy problems to solve. From a security perspective, it seems we still have a job to do in educating the market about shared responsibility in the cloud, especially when it comes to newer technologies, like serverless and containers. Every time there’s a new way of deploying an app, it seems like people make the same mistakes all over again — presuming the vendors are in charge of security.
Automation is a key ingredient of successful migrations. Organizations should be automating everywhere, including policies and governance, to bring more consistency to projects and keep costs under control. In doing so, they must realize that this may require a redesign of apps, and a change in the tools they use to deploy and manage those apps.
Ultimately, you can migrate apps to the cloud in a couple of clicks. But the governance, policy, and management that must go along with this is often forgotten. That’s why you need clear strategic objectives and careful planning to secure more successful outcomes. It may not be very sexy, but it’s the best way forward.
To learn more about cloud migration, check out our blog series. And catch up on all of the latest trends in DevOps to learn more about securing your cloud environment.
The post Fixing cloud migration: What goes wrong and why? appeared first on .
Migrating to the cloud is hard. The PowerPoint deck and pretty architectures are drawn up quickly but the work required to make the move will take months and possibly years.
The early stages require significant effort by teams to learn new technologies (the cloud services themselves) and new ways of the working (the shared responsibility model).
In the early days of your cloud efforts, the cloud center of expertise is a logical model to follow.
A cloud center of excellence is exactly what it sounds like. Your organization forms a new team—or an existing team grows into the role—that focuses on setting cloud standards and architectures.
They are often the “go-to” team for any cloud questions. From the simple (“What’s an Amazon S3 bucket?”), to the nuanced (“What are the advantages of Amazon Aurora over RDS?”), to the complex (“What’s the optimum index/sort keying for this DynamoDB table?”).
The cloud center of excellence is the one-stop shop for cloud in your organization. At the beginning, this organizational design choice can greatly accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies.
The problem is that accelerated adoption doesn’t necessarily correlate with accelerated understanding and learning.
In fact, as the center of excellent continues to grow its success, there is an inverse failure in organizational learning which create a general lack of cloud fluency.
Cloud fluency is an idea introduced by Forrest Brazeal at A Cloud Guru that describes the general ability of all teams within the organization to discuss cloud technologies and solutions. Forrest’s blog post shines a light on this situation and is summed up nicely in this cartoon;
Our own Mark Nunnikhoven also spoke to Forrest on episode 2 of season 2 for #LetsTalkCloud.
Even though the cloud center of excellence team sets out to teach everyone and raise the bar, the work soon piles up and the team quickly shifts away from an educational mandate to a “fix everything” one.
What was once a cloud accelerator is now a place of burnout for your top, hard-to-replace cloud talent.
If you’ve paid attention to how cybersecurity teams operate within organizations, you have probably spotted a number of very concerning similarities.
Cybersecurity teams are also considered a center of excellence and the central team within the organization for security knowledge.
Most requests for security architecture, advice, operations, and generally anything that includes the prefix “cyber”, word “risk”, or hints of “hacking” get routed to this team.
This isn’t the security team’s fault. Over the years, systems have increased in complexity, more and more incidents occur, and security teams rarely get the opportunity to look ahead. They are too busy stuck in “firefighting mode” to take as step back and re-evaluate the organizational design structure they work within.
According to Gartner, for every 750 employees in an organization, one of those is dedicated to cybersecurity. Those are impossible odds that have lead to the massive security skills gap.
Security needs to follow the example of cloud fluency. We need “security fluency” in order to import the security posture of the systems we built and to reduce the risk our organizations face.
This is the reason that security teams need to turn their efforts to educating development teams. DevSecOps is a term chock full of misconceptions and it lacks context to drive the needed changes but it is handy for raising awareness of the lack of security fluency.
Successful adoption of a DevOps philosophy is all about removing barriers to customer success. Providing teams with the tools and autonomy they require is a critical factor in their success.
Security is just one aspect of the development team’s toolkit. It’s up to the current security team to help educate them on the principles driving modern cybersecurity and how to ensure that the systems they build work as intended…and only as intended.
The post Are You Promoting Security Fluency in your Organization? appeared first on .
“Cloud security is simple, absolutely simple. Stop over complicating it.”
This is how I kicked off a presentation I gave at the CyberRisk Alliance, Cloud Security Summit on Apr 17 of this year. And I truly believe that cloud security is simple, but that does not mean easy. You need the right strategy.
As I am often asked about strategies for the cloud, and the complexities that come with it, I decided to share my recent talk with you all. Depending on your preference, you can either watch the video below or read the transcript of my talk that’s posted just below the video. I hope you find it useful and will enjoy it. And, as always, I’d love to hear from you, find me @marknca.
For those of you who prefer to read rather than watch a video, here’s the transcript of my talk:
Cloud security is simple, absolutely simple. Stop over complicating it.
Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Wait a minute, what is this guy talking about? He is just off his rocker.”
Remember, simple doesn’t mean easy. I think we make things way more complicated than they need to be when it comes to securing the cloud, and this makes our lives a lot harder than they need to be. There’s some massive advantages when it comes to security in the cloud. Primarily, I think we can simplify our security approach because of three major reasons.
The first is integrated identity and access management. All three major cloud providers, AWS, Google and Microsoft offer fantastic identity, and access management systems. These are things that security, and [inaudible 00:00:48] professionals have been clamouring for, for decades.
We finally have this ability, we need to take advantage of it.
The second main area is the shared responsibility model. We’ll cover that more in a minute, but it’s an absolutely wonderful tool to understand your mental model, to realize where you need to focus your security efforts, and the third area that simplifies security for us is the universal application of APIs or application programming interfaces.
These give us as security professionals the ability to orchestrate. and automate a huge amount of the grunt work away. These three things add up to, uh, the ability for us to execute a very sophisticated, uh, or very difficult to pull off, uh, security practice, but one that ultimately is actually pretty simple in its approach.
It’s just all the details are hard and we’re going to use these three advantages to make those details simpler. So, let’s take a step back for a second and look at what our goal is.
What is the goal of cybersecurity? That’s not something you hear quite often as a question.
A lot of the time you’ll hear the definition of cybersecurity is, uh, about, uh, securing the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information or data. The CIA triad, different CIA, but I like to phrase this in a different way. I think the goal is much clearer, and the goal’s much simpler.
It is to make sure that whatever you’re building works as intended and only as intended. Now, you’ll realize you can’t accomplish this goal just as a security team. You need to work with your, uh, developers, you need to work with operations, you need to work with the business units, with the end users of your application as well.
This is a wonderful way of phrasing our goal, and realizing that we’re all in this together to make sure whatever you’re building works as intended, and only as intended.
Now, if we move forward, and we look at who are we up against, who’s preventing our stuff from working, uh, well?
You look at normally, you think of, uh, who’s attacking our systems? Who are the risks? Is it nation states? Is it maybe insider threats? While these are valid threats, they’re really overblown. You’re… don’t have to worry about nation state attacks.
If you’re a nation state, worry about it. If you’re not a nation state, you don’t have to worry about it because frankly, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. You can slow them down a little bit, but by definition, they’re going to get through your resources.
As far as insider attacks, this is an HR problem. Treat your people well. Um, check in with them, and have a strong information management policy in place, and you’re going to reduce this threat naturally. If you go hunting for people, you’re going to create the very threats that you’re looking at.
So, it brings us to the next set. What about cyber criminals? You know, we do have to worry about cyber criminals.
Cyber criminals are targeting systems simply because these systems are online, these are profit motivated criminals who are organized, and have a good set of tools, so we absolutely need to worry about them, but there’s a more insidious or more commonplace, maybe a simpler threat that we need to worry about, and that’s one of mistakes.
The vast majority of issues that happen around data breaches around security vulnerabilities in the cloud are mistake driven. In fact, to the point where I would not even worry about cyber criminals simply because all the work we’re going to do to focus on, uh, preventing mistakes.
And catching, and rectifying the stakes really, really quickly is going to uh, you a cover all the stuff that we would have done to block out cyber criminals as well, so mistakes are very common because people are using a lot more services in the cloud.
You have a lot more, um, parts and moving, uh, complexity in your deployment, um, and you’re going to make a mistake, which is why you need to put automated systems in place to make sure that those mistakes don’t happen, or if they do happen that they’re caught very, very quickly.
This applies to standard DevOps, the philosophies for building. It also applies to security very, very wonderfully, so this is the main thing we’re going to focus on.
So, if we look at that sum up together, we have our goal of making sure whatever we’re building works as intended, and only as intended, and our major issue here, the biggest risk to this is simple mistakes and misconfigurations.
Okay, so we’re not starting from ground zero here. We can learn from others, and the first place we’re going to learn is the shared responsibility model. The shared responsibility applies to all cloud service providers.
If you look on the left hand side of the slide here, you’ll see the traditional on premise model. We roughly have six areas where something has to be done roughly daily, whether it’s patching, maintenance, uh, just operational visibility, monitoring, that kind of thing, and in a traditional on premise environment, you’re responsible for all of it, whether it’s your team, or a team underneath your organization.
Somewhere within your tree, people are on the hook for doing stuff daily. Here when we move into an infrastructure, so getting a virtual machine from a cloud provider right off the bat, half of the responsibilities are pushed away.
That’s a huge, huge win.
And, as we move further and further to the right to more managed service, or staff level services, we have less and less daily responsibilities.
Now, of course, you always still have to verify that the cloud service provider’s doing what they, uh, say they’re doing, which is why certifications and compliance frameworks come into play, uh, but the bottom line is you’re doing less work, so you can focus on fewer areas.
Um, that is, or I should say not less work, but you’re doing, uh, less broad of a work.
So you can have that deeper focus, and of course, you always have to worry about service configuration. You are given knobs and dials to turn to lock things down. You should use them like things like encrypting, uh, all your data at rest.
Most of the time it’s an easy check box, but it’s up to you to check it ‘cause it’s your responsibility.
We also have the idea of an adoption framework, and this applies for Azure, for AWS and for Google, uh, and what they do is they help you map out your business processes.
This is important to security, because it gives you the understanding of where your data is, what’s important to the business, where does it lie, who needs to touch it, and access it and process it.
That also gives us the idea, uh, or the ability to identify the stakeholders, so that we know, uh, you know, who’s concerned about this data, who is, has an investment in this data, and finally it helps to, to deliver an action plan.
The output of all of these frameworks is to deliver an action plan to help you migrate into the cloud and help you to continuously evolve. Well, it’s also a phenomenal map for your security efforts.
You want to prioritize security, this is how you do it. You get it through the adoption framework, understanding what’s important to the business, and that lets you identify critical systems and areas for your security.
Again, we want to keep things simple, right? And, the third, uh, the o- other things we want to look at is the CIS foundations. They have them for AWS, Azure and GCP, um, and these provide a prescriptive guidance.
They’re really, um, a strong baseline, and a checklist of tasks that you can accomplish, um, or take on, on your, uh, take on, on your own, excuse me, uh, in order to, um, you know, basically cover off the really basics is encryption at rest on, um, you know, do I make sure that I don’t have, uh, things needlessly exposed to the internet, that type of thing.
Really fantastic reference point and a starting point for your security practice.
Again, with this idea of keeping things as simple as possible, so when it comes to looking at our security policy, we’ve used the frameworks, um, and the baseline to kind of set up a strong, uh, start to understand, uh, where the business is concerned, and to prioritize.
And, the first question we need to ask ourselves as security practitioners, what happened? If we, if something happens, and we ask what happened?
Do we have the ability to answer this question? So, that starts us off with logging and auditing. This needs to be in place before something happened. Let me just say that again, before something happened, you need [laughs] to be able to have this information in place.
Now, uh, this is really, uh, to ask these key questions of what happened in my account, and who, or what made that thing happen?
So, this starts in the cloud with some basic services. Uh, for AWS it’s cloud trail, for Azure, it’s monitor, and for Google Cloud it used to be called Stackdriver, it is now the Google Cloud operations suite, so these need to be enabled on at full volume.
Don’t worry, you can use some lifecycle rules on the data source to keep your costs low.
But, this gives you that layer, that basic auditing and logging layer, so that you can answer that question of what happened?
So, the next question you want to ask yourself or have the ability to answer is who’s there, right? Who’s doing what in my account? And, that comes down to identity.
We’ve already mentioned this is one of the key pillars of keeping security simple, and getting that highly effective security in your cloud.
[00:09:00] So here you’re answering the questions of who are you, and what are you allowed to do? This is where we get a very simple privilege, uh, or principle in security, which is the principle of least privilege.
You want to give an identity, so whether that’s a user, or a role, or a service, uh, only the privileges they, uh, require that are essential to perform the task that, uh, they are intended to do.
Okay?
So, basically if I need to write a file into a storage, um, folder or a bucket, I should only have the ability to write that file. I don’t need to read it, I don’t need to delete it, I just need to write to it, so only give me that ability.
Remember, that comes back to the other pillar of simple security here of, of key cloud security, is integrated identity.
This is where it really takes off, is that we start to assign very granular access permissions, and don’t worry, we’re going to use the APIs to automate all this stuff, so that it’s not a management headache, but the principle of these privilege is absolutely critical here.
The services you’re going to be using, amazingly, all three cloud providers got in line, and named them the same thing. It’s IAM, identity access management, whether that’s AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
Now, the next question we’re going to a- ask ourselves are the areas where we’re going to be looking at is really where should I be focusing security controls? Where should I be putting stuff in place?
Because up until now we’ve really talked about leveraging what’s available from the cloud service providers, and you absolutely should available, uh, maximize your usage of their, um, native and primitive, uh, structures primitive as far as base concepts, not as, um, refined.
They’re very advanced controls and, but there are times where you’re going to need to put in your own controls, and these are the areas you’re going to focus on, so you’re going to start with networking, right?
So, in your networking, you’re going to maximize the native structures that are available in the cloud that you’re in, so whether that’s a project structure in Google Cloud, whether that’s a service like transit gateway in AWS, um, and all of them have this idea of a VPC or virtual private cloud or virtual network that is a very strong boundary for you to use.
Remember, most of the time you’re not charged for the creation of those. You have limits in your accounts, but accounts are free, and you can keep adding more, uh, virtual networks. You may be saying, wait a minute, I’m trying to simplify things.
Actually, having multiple virtual networks or virtual private clouds ends up being far simpler because each of them has a task. You go, this application runs in this virtual private cloud, not a big shared one in this specific VPC, and that gives you this wonderfully strong security boundaries, and a very simple way of looking at one VPC, one action, very much the Unix philosophy in play.
Key here though is understanding that while all of the security controls in place for your service provider, um, give you, so, you know, whether it’s VPCs, routing tables, um, uh, access control lists, security groups, all the SDN features that they’ve got in place.
These really help you figure out whether service A or system A is allowed to talk to B, but they don’t tell you what they’re saying.
And, that’s where additional controls called an IPS, or intrusion prevention system come into play, and you may want to look at getting a third party control in to do that, because none of the th- big three cloud providers offer an IPS at this point.
[00:12:00] But that gives you the ability to not just say, “Hey, you’re allowed to talk to each other.” But, to monitor that conversation, to ensure that there’s not malicious code being passed back and forth between systems that nobody’s trying a denial of service attack.
A whole bunch of extra things on there have, so that’s where IPS comes into play in your network defense. Now, we look at compute, right?
We can have compute in various forms, whether that’s in serverless functions, whether that’s in containers, manage containers, whether that’s in traditional virtual machines, but all the principles are the same.
You want to understand where the shared responsibility line is, how much is on your plate, how much is on the CSPs?
You want to understand that you need to harden the EOS, or the service, or both in some cases, make sure that, that’s locked down, so have administrator passwords. Very, very complicated.
Don’t log into these systems, uh, you know, because you want to be fixing things upstream. You want to be fixing things in the build pipeline, not logging into these systems directly, and that’s a huge thing for, uh, systems people to get over, but it’s absolutely essential for security, and you know what?
It’s going to take a while, but there’s some tricks there you can follow with me. You can see, uh, on the slides, uh, at Mark, that is my social everywhere, uh, happy to walk you through the next steps.
This idea of this presentation’s really just the simple basics to start with, to give you that overview of where to focus your time, and, dispel that myth that cloud security is complicating things.
It is a huge path is simplicity, which is a massive lens, or for security.
So, the last area you want to focus here is in data and storage. Whether this is databases, whether this is big blob storage, or, uh, buckets in AWS, it doesn’t really matter the principles, again, all the same.
You want to encrypt your data at rest using the native cloud provided, uh, cloud service provider, uh, features functionality, because most of the time it’s just give it a key address, and give it a checkbox, and you’re good to go.
It’s never been easier to encrypt things, and there is no excuse for it and none of the providers charge extra for, uh, encryption, which is amazing, and you absolutely want to be taking advantage of that, and you want to be as granular as possible with your IAM, uh, and as reasonable, okay?
So, there’s a line here, and a lot of the data stores that are native to the cloud service providers, you can go right down to the data cell level and say, Mark has access, or Mark doesn’t have access to this cell.
That can be highly effective, and maybe right for your use case. It might be too much as well.
But, the nice thing is that you have that option. It’s integrated, it’s pretty straightforward to implement, and then, uh, when we look here, uh, sorry. and then, finally you want to be looking at lifecycle strategies to keep your costs under control.
Um, data really spins out of control when you don’t have to worry about capacity. All of the cloud service providers have some fantastic automations in place.
Basically, just giving you, uh, very simple rules to say, “Okay, after 90 days, move this over to cheaper storage. After 180 days, you know, get rid of it completely, or put it in cold storage.”
Take advantage of those or your bill’s going to spiral out of control, and, and that relates to availability ‘cause uh, uh, and reliability, ‘cause the more you’re spending on that kind of stuff, the less you have to spend on other areas like security and operational efficiency.
So, that brings us to our next big security question. Is this working?
[00:15:00] How do you know if any of this stuff is working? Well, you want to talk about the concept of traceability. Traceability is a, you know, somewhat formal definition, but for me it really comes down to where did this come from, who can access it, and when did they access it?
That ties very closely with the concept of observability. Basically, the ability to look at, uh, closed systems and to infer what’s going on inside based on what’s coming into that system, and what’s leaving that system, really what’s going on.
There’s some great tools here from the service providers. Again, you want to look at, uh, Amazon CloudWatch, uh, Azure Monitor and the Google Cloud operations, uh, suite. Um, and here this leads us to the key, okay?
This is the key to simplifying everything, and I know we’ve covered a ton in this presentation, but I really want you to take a good look at this slide, and again, hit me up, uh, @marknca, happy to answer any questions with, questions afterwards as well here, um, that this will really, really make this simple, and this will really take your security practice to the next level.
If the idea of something happened in your, cloud system, right? In your deployment, there’s a trigger, and then, it either is generating an event or a log.
If you go the bottom row here, you’ve got a log, which you can then react to in a function to deliver some sort of result. That’s the slow-lane on the bottom.
We’re talking minutes here. You also have the top lane where your trigger fires off an event, and then, you react to that with a function, and then, you get a result in the fast lane.
These things happen in seconds, sub-second time. You start to build out your security practice based on this model.
You start automating more and more in these functions, whether it’s, uh, Lambda, whether it’s Cloud Functions, whether it’s Azure Functions, it doesn’t matter.
The CSPs all offer the same core functionality here. This is the critical, critical success metric, is that when you start reacting in the fast lane automatically to things, so if you see that a security event is triggered from like your malware, uh, on your, uh, virtual machine, you can lock that off, and have a new one spin up automatically.
Um, if you’re looking for compliance stuff, the slow lane is the place to go, because it takes minutes.
Reactions happen up top, more, um, stately or more sedate things, so somebody logging into a system is both up top and down low, so up top, if you logged into a VPC or into, um, an instance, or a virtual machine, you’d have a trigger fire off and maybe ask me immediately, “Mark, did you log into the system? Uh, ‘cause you’re, you know, you’re not supposed to be.”
But then I’d respond and say, “Yeah, I, I did log in.” So, immediately you don’t have to respond. It’s not an incident response scenario, but on the bottom track, maybe you’re tracking how many times I’ve logged in.
And after the three or fourth time maybe someone comes by, and has a chat with me, and says, “Hey, do you keep logging into these systems? Can’t you fix it upstream in the deployment, uh, and build a pipeline ‘cause that’s where we need to be moving?”
So, you’ll find this balance, and this concept, I just wanted to get into your heads right now of automating your security practice. If you have a checklist, it should be sitting in a model like this, because it’ll help you, uh, reduce your workload, right?
The idea is to get as much automated possible, and keep things in very clear, and simple boundaries, and what’s more simple than having every security action listed as an automated function, uh, sitting in a code repository somewhere?
[00:18:00] Fantastic approach to modern security practice in the cloud. Very simple, very clear. Yes, difficult to implement. It can be, but it’s an awesome, simple mental model to keep in your head that everything gets automated as a function based on a trigger somewhere.
So, what are the keys to success? What are the keys to keeping this cloud security thing simple? And, hopefully you’ve realized the difference between a simple mental model, and the challenges, uh, in, uh, implementation.
It can be difficult. It’s not easy to implement, but the mental model needs to be kept simple, right? Keep things in their own VPCs, and their own accounts, automate everything. Very, very simple approach. Everything fits into this s- into this structure, so the keys here are remembering the goal.
Make sure that cybersecurity, uh, is making sure that whatever you build works as intended and only as intended. It’s understanding the shared responsibility model, and it’s really looking at, uh, having a plan through cloud adoption frameworks, how to build well, which is a, uh, a concept called the Well-Architected Framework.
It’s specific to AWS, but it’s generic, um, its principles, it can be applied everywhere. We didn’t cover it here, but I’ll put the links, um, in the materials for you, uh, as well as remembering systems over people, right?
Adding the right controls at the right time, uh, and then, finally observing and react. Be vigilant, practice. You’re not going to get this right out of the gates, uh, perfect.
You’re going to have to refine, iterate, and then it’s extremely cloud friendly. That is the cloud model is, get it out there, iterate quickly, but putting the structures in place, you’re not going to make sure that you’re not doing that in an insecure manner.
Thank you very much, uh, here’s a couple of links that’ll help you out before we take some Q&A here, um, trendmicro.com/cloud will get you to the products to learn more. We’re also doing this really cool streaming.
Uh, I host a show called Let’s Talk Cloud. Um, we uh, interview experts, uh, and have a great conversation around, um, what they’re talking about, uh, in the cloud, what they’re working on, and not just around security, but just in building in general.
You can hit that up at trendtalks.fyi. Um, and again, hit me up on social @marknca.
So, we have a couple of questions to kick this off, and you can put more questions in the webinar here, and they will send them along, or answer them in kind if they can.
Um, and that’s really what these are about, is the interaction is getting that, um, to and from. So, the first question that I wanted to tackle is an interesting one, and it’s really that systems over people.
Um, you heard me mention it in the, uh, in the end and the question is really what does that mean systems over people? Isn’t security really about people’s expertise?
And, yes and no, so if you are a SOC analyst, if you are working in a security, uh, role right now, I am really confident saying that 80%, 90% of what you do right now could be delegated out to a system.
So, if you were looking at log lines, and stuff that should be done by systems and bubble up, just the goal for you to investigate to do what people are good at in systems are bad at, so systems mean, uh, you know, putting in, uh, to build pipeline, putting in container scanning in the build pipeline, so that you have to manually scan stuff, right to get rid of the basics. Is that a pen test? 100% no.
Um, but it gets rid of that, hey, you didn’t upgrade to, um, you know, this version of this library.
[00:21:00] That’s all automated, and those, the more systems you get in place, the more you as a security professional, or your security team will be able to focus on where they can really deliver value and frankly, where it’s more interesting work, so that’s what systems over people mean, is basically automate as much as you can to get people doing what people are really good at, and to make sure that the systems catch what we make as mistakes all the time.
If you accidentally try to push an old build out, you know that systems should stop that, if you push a build that hasn’t been checked by that container scanning or by, um, you know, it doesn’t have the appropriate security policy in place.
Systems should catch all that humans shouldn’t have to worry about it at all. That’s systems over processing. You saw that on the, uh, keys to success slide here. I’ll just pull it up. Um, you know, is that, that’s absolutely key.
Another question that we had, uh, was what we didn’t get into here, which was around the Well-Architected Framework. Now, this is a document that was published by AWS, uh, a number of years back, and they’ve kept it going.
They’ve evolved it and essentially it has five pillars. Um, performance, efficiency, uh, op- reliability, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence. Hey, I’ve got all five.
Um, and really [laughs] what that is, is it’s about how to take advantage of these cloud tools.
Now, AWS publishes it, but honestly it applies to Azure, it applies to Google Cloud as well. It’s not service specific. It teaches you how to build in the cloud, and obviously security is one of those big pillars, but it’s… so talking about teaching you how to make those trade offs, how to build an innovation flywheel, so that you have an idea, test it, uh, get the feedback from it, and move forward.
Um, and that’s really, really key. Again, now you should be reading that even if you are an Azure, or GCP customer or, uh, that’s where you’re putting your most of your stuff, because it’s really about the principles, and everything we do, and encourage people to build well, it means that there’s less security issues, right?
Especially we know that the number one problem is mistakes.
That leads to the last question we have here, which is about that, how can I say that cyber criminals, you don’t need to worry about them.
You need to worry about mistakes? That’s a good question. It’s valid, and, um, Trend Micro does a huge amount of research around cyber criminals. I do a whole huge amount of research around cyber criminals.
Uh, my training, by training, and by professional experience. I’m a forensic investigator. This is what I do is take down cyber crimes. Um, but I think mistakes are the number one thing that we deal with in the cloud simply because of the underlying complexity.
I know it’s ironic, and to talk about simplicity, to talk about complexity, but the idea is, um, is that you look at all the major breaches, especially around s3 buckets, those are all m- based on mistake.
There’ve been billions, and billions, and billions of records, and, uh, millions of dollars of damage exposed because of simple mistakes, and that is far more common, uh, than cyber criminals.
And yes, cyber crimes you have [inaudible 00:23:32] worry. You have to worry about them, but everything you’re going to do to fix mistakes, and to put systems in place to stop those mistakes from happening is also going to be for your pr- uh, protection up against cyber criminals, and honestly, if you’re the guy who runs around your organization’s screaming about cyber criminals all the time, you’re far less credible than if you’re saying, “Hey, I want to make sure that we build really, really well, and don’t make mistakes.”
Thank you for taking the time. My name’s Mark Nunnikhoven. I’m the vice president of cloud research at Trend Micro. I’m also an AWS community hero, and I love this stuff. Hit me up on social @marknca. Happy to chat more.
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The endpoint has long been a major focal point for attackers targeting enterprise IT environments. Yet increasingly, security bosses are being forced to protect data across the organization, whether it’s in the cloud, on IoT devices, in email, or on-premises servers. Attackers may jump from one environment to the next in multi-stage attacks and even hide between the layers. So, it pays to have holistic visibility, in order to detect and respond more effectively.
This is where XDR solutions offer a convincing alternative to EDR and point solutions. But unfortunately, not all providers are created equal. Trend Micro separates themselves from the pack by providing mature security capabilities across all layers, industry-leading threat intelligence, and an AI-powered analytical approach that produces fewer, higher fidelity alerts.
Under pressure
It’s no secret that IT security teams today are under extreme pressure. They’re faced with an enemy able to tap into a growing range of tools and techniques from the cybercrime underground. Ransomware, social engineering, fileless malware, vulnerability exploits, and drive-by-downloads, are just the tip of the iceberg. There are “several hundred thousand new malicious programs or unwanted apps registered every day,” according to a new Osterman Research report. It argues that, while endpoint protection must be a “key component” in corporate security strategy, “It can only be one strand” —complemented with protection in the cloud, on the network, and elsewhere.
There’s more. Best-of-breed approaches have saddled organizations with too many disparate tools over the years, creating extra cost, complexity, management headaches, and security gaps. This adds to the workload for overwhelmed security teams.
According to Gartner, “Two of the biggest challenges for all security organizations are hiring and retaining technically savvy security operations staff, and building a security operations capability that can confidently configure and maintain a defensive posture as well as provide a rapid detection and response capacity. Mainstream organizations are often overwhelmed by the intersectionality of these two problems.”
XDR appeals to organizations struggling with all of these challenges as well as those unable to gain value from, or who don’t have the resources to invest in, SIEM or SOAR solutions. So what does it involve?
What to look for
As reported by Gartner, all XDR solutions should fundamentally achieve the following:
However, the analyst urges IT buyers to think carefully before choosing which provider to invest in. That’s because, in some cases, underlying threat intelligence may be underpowered, and vendors have gaps in their product portfolio which could create dangerous IT blind spots. Efficacy will be a key metric. As Gartner says, “You will not only have to answer the question of does it find things, but also is it actually finding things that your existing tooling is not.”
A leader in XDR
This is where Trend Micro XDR excels. It has been designed to go beyond the endpoint, collecting and correlating data from across the organization, including; email, endpoint, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. With this enhanced context, and the power of Trend Micro’s AI algorithms and expert security analytics, the platform is able to identify threats more easily and contain them more effectively.
Forrester recently recognized Trend Micro as a leader in enterprise detection and response, saying of XDR, “Trend Micro has a forward-thinking approach and is an excellent choice for organizations wanting to centralize reporting and detection with XDR but have less capacity for proactively performing threat hunting.”
According to Gartner, fewer than 5% of organizations currently employ XDR. This means there’s a huge need to improve enterprise-wide protection. At a time when corporate resources are being stretched to the limit, Trend Micro XDR offers global organizations an invaluable chance to minimize enterprise risk exposure whilst maximizing the productivity of security teams.
The post Beyond the Endpoint: Why Organizations are Choosing XDR for Holistic Detection and Response appeared first on .
Organisations have been forced to adapt rapidly over the past few months as government lockdowns kept most workers to their homes. For many, the changes they’ve made may even become permanent as more distributed working becomes the norm. This has major implications for cybersecurity. Employees are often described as the weakest link in the corporate security chain, so do they become an even greater liability when working from home?
Unfortunately, a major new study from Trend Micro finds that, although many have become more cyber-aware during lockdown, bad habits persist. CISOs looking to ramp up user awareness training may get a better return on investment if they try to personalize strategies according to specific user personas.
What we found
We polled 13,200 remote workers across 27 countries to compile the Head in the Clouds study. It reveals that 72% feel more conscious of their organisation’s cybersecurity policies since lockdown began, 85% claim they take IT instructions seriously, and 81% agree that cybersecurity is partly their responsibility. Nearly two-thirds (64%) even admit that using non-work apps on a corporate device is a risk.
Yet in spite of these lockdown learnings, many employees are more preoccupied by productivity. Over half (56%) admit using a non-work app on a corporate device, and 66% have uploaded corporate data to it; 39% of respondents “often” or “always” access corporate data from a personal device; and 29% feel they can get away with using a non-work app, as IT-backed solutions are “nonsense.”
This is a recipe for shadow IT and escalating levels of cyber-risk. It also illustrates that current approaches to user awareness training are falling short. In fact, many employees seem to be aware of what best practice looks like, they just choose not to follow it.
Four security personas
This is where the second part of the research comes in. Trend Micro commissioned Dr Linda Kaye, Cyberpsychology Academic at Edge Hill University, to profile four employee personas based on their cybersecurity behaviors: fearful, conscientious, ignorant and daredevil.
In this way: Fearful employees may benefit from training simulation tools like Trend Micro’s Phish Insight, with real-time feedback from security controls and mentoring.
Conscientious staff require very little training but can be used as exemplars of good behavior, and to team up with “buddies” from the other groups.
Ignorant users need gamification techniques and simulation exercises to keep them engaged in training, and may also require additional interventions to truly understand the consequences of risky behavior.
Daredevil employees are perhaps the most challenging because their wrongdoing is the result not of ignorance but a perceived superiority to others. Organisations may need to use award schemes to promote compliance, and, in extreme circumstances, step up data loss prevention and security controls to mitigate their risky behavior.
By understanding that no two employees are the same, security leaders can tailor their approach in a more nuanced way. Splitting staff into four camps should ensure a more personalized approach than the one-size-fits-all training sessions most organisations run today.
Ultimately, remote working only works if there is a high degree of trust between managers and their teams. Once the pandemic recedes and staff are technically allowed back in the office, that trust will have to be re-earned if they are to continue benefiting from a Work From Home environment.
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Risk decisions are the foundation of information security. Sadly, they are also one of the most often misunderstood parts of information security.
This is bad enough on its own but can sink any effort at education as an organization moves towards a DevOps philosophy.
To properly evaluate the risk of an event, two components are required:
Unfortunately, teams—and humans in general—are reasonably good at the first part and unreasonably bad at the second.
This is a problem.
It’s a problem that is amplified when security starts to integration with teams in a DevOps environment. Originally presented as part of AllTheTalks.online, this talk examines the ins and outs of risk decisions and how we can start to work on improving how our teams handle them.
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On Thursday, June 25, Trend Micro hosted our Perspectives 2-hour virtual event. As the session progressed, we asked our attendees, composed of +5000 global registrants, two key questions. This blog analyzes those answers.
First, what is your current strategy for securing the cloud?
Rely completely on native cloud platform security capabilities (AWS, Azure, Google…) 33%
Add on single-purpose security capabilities (workload protection, container security…) 13%
Add on security platform with multiple security capabilities for reduced complexity 54%
This result affirms IDC analyst Frank Dickson’s observation that most cloud customers will benefit from a suite offering a range of security capabilities covering multiple cloud environments. For the 15% to 20% of organizations that rely on one cloud provider, purchasing a security solution from that vendor may provide sufficient coverage. The quest for point products (which may be best-of-breed, as well) introduces additional complexity across multiple cloud platforms, which can obscure problems, confuse cybersecurity analysts and business users, increase costs, and reduce efficiency. The comprehensive suite strategy compliments most organizations’ hybrid, multi-cloud approach.
Second, and this is multiple choice, how are you enabling secure digital transformation in the cloud today?
This shows that cloud users are open to many available solutions for improving cloud security. The adoption pattern follows traditional on-premise security deployment models. The most commonly cited solution, Network Security/Cloud IPS, recognizes that communication with anything in the cloud requires a trustworthy network. This is a very familiar technique, dating back in the on-premise environment to the introduction of firewalls in the early 1990s from vendors like CheckPoint and supported by academic research as found in Cheswick and Bellovin’s Firewalls and Internet Security (Addison Wesley, 1994).
The frequency of data exposure due to misconfigured cloud instances surely drives Cloud Security Posture Management, certainly aided by the ease of deployment of tools like Cloud One conformity.
The newness of containers in the production environment most likely explains the relatively lower deployment of container security today.
The good news is that organizations do not have to deploy and manage a multitude of point products addressing one problem on one environment. The suite approach simplifies today’s reality and positions the organization for tomorrow’s challenges.
Looking ahead, future growth in industrial IoT and increasing deployments of 5G-based public and non-public networks will drive further innovations, increasing the breadth of the suite approach to securing hybrid, multi-cloud environments.
What do you think? Let me know @WilliamMalikTM.
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